25-second summary:

• The faster your website, the higher your chances to engage with new visitors and potential customers.
• The closer a server is to your visitors, the smaller the latency they’ll experience. That’s why it’s key to know where most of your visitors are based to define your server’s proximity.
• The crucial aspect you need to keep in mind is the flexibility your theme provides: are you able to customize it and even to disable features that you’re not planning to use? If “yes” it’s your answer, that’s a good theme to test.
• You shouldn’t worry about the number of plugins you’re installing as long as those plugins are coded properly.
• Caching can help your server remember your content to make access to your pages faster.
• Large images can significantly affect your site’s load speed and it can be one of the critical aspects many site owners overlook.
• Work on building a light and minimal template for 404 pages and serve that instead of the default one.
• Comments can negatively affect the load speed of your pages. Optimizing native WordPress comments, disabling them altogether, or using a third-party system can be a fix for that.
• If you are not running a blog on your site, you could simply disable the RSS feed to improve WordPress performance.